We must reject state funding of political parties

SO IT'S taken just over two years for David Cameron’s prediction in February 2010, that lobbying “is the next big scandal waiting to happen”, to come true. Either Mr Cameron was being remarkably open about his own party’s involvement in such disreputable behaviour or he has left himself open to the charge of hypocrisy. We can decide for ourselves which of those explanations is likely to be true.

Whichever it is the revelation that Peter Cruddas, now ex-chief fundraiser of the Conservative Party, tried to flog private dinners with the PM and influence over policy has re-opened the issue of party funding.

Worryingly for the future health of our democracy, the conclusion that many people have jumped to – that we need to move to state funding of political parties – would make the real problem even worse.

Because the real problem is not that too many people are handing money over to parties but too few. Instead of a small number of donors handing over large sums, a healthy democracy should have many donors giving relatively small sums. But the state of politics today rules that out.

Look at all three main parties and you will see three types of clique, each in its own way far removed from the real lives of ordinary voters. The three parties have a focus far removed from the wishes of their own members, let alone voters.

the conclusion that many people have jumped to – that we need to move to state funding of political parties – would make the real problem even worse

When they come to raise funds there is a limited pool of potential donors who share their views and another that is after favours in return. Fundraisers grub around in this terrain for a cheque to cash.

THE Lib Dem group of potential funders is the smallest of the lot. Fixated on the wonders of the EU, the brilliance of the Human Rights Act and the need to change the electoral system, out of touch doesn’t even come close to describing it.

So desperate are the Lib Dems for funds that despite their claim to be whiter than white they happily banked £2.4million offered to them by Michael Brown to fund their 2005 election campaign.

The party’s then leader Charles Kennedy flew around with Mr Brown in his private jet. When the donor turned out to be a fraudster, they refused to hand back any of the money stolen by Mr Brown and given to the Lib Dems.

But Labour and the Conservatives are equally disconnected from the views of real voters and their own members. Labour boasts that its trade union links give it a grounding in everyday life. But to take so much money from this vested interest is clearly unhealthy.

And the upper echelons of the party are in any case full of professional politicians, few of whom have ever had a real job in the outside world. Take Ed Miliband. After a brief stint as a TV researcher, he went to work for Harriet Harman in 1993 and, apart from a year as an academic at Harvard, has spent the rest of his life working for the Labour Party.

Ed Balls was a journalist at the Financial Times before working for Gordon Brown and then getting elected. And Yvette Cooper was a broadsheet journalist too.

Ask most Labour members, let alone Labour voters, what they think of the big issues – the EU, law and order, taxation, the environment and so on – and you’ll get very different views from those of the leadership clique.

The same is just as true for the Tories. For every Philip Hammond, the Defence Secretary, who has run a number of businesses in the real world, there is a David Cameron and a George Osborne who have seen much less of life outside the political bubble.

Mr Cameron went straight from university into politics as a researcher, leaving only for a brief stint as a public relations man before being elected as an MP. Mr Osborne went to work for the Conservative Party in 1994 and has never left.

This domination of politics by professional politicians, who are almost totally disconnected from voters, becomes self-reinforcing.

Because the parties ignore the issues that really matter to voters they can turn only to funders who share their views. And when they get that funding, they can afford to ignore the rest.

Most Conservative members, many Labour members and almost all voters are – to put it mildly – distinctly Eurosceptic.

When Mr Cameron bared his Eurosceptic teeth at the Brussels summit in December, he was wildly popular for standing up for Britain.

YET within weeks he had reverted to classic establishment type, cosying up to the EU, desperate to smooth feathers he had ruffled and happy to disregard the views of the people he is supposed to represent.

On law and order, no major politician has embarked on the full-scale overhaul of punishment that voters want.

Politicians on all sides push a stratospherically expensive green agenda and hand over billions in foreign aid. Yet when asked, few of us want anything of the sort.

This all represents a huge disconnection between the cliquey political class and the rest of us. And it threatens democracy because at some point voters will get fed up with being ignored on the major issues.

But the very worst response to a scandal that has developed because too few people are involved in politics would be a move to state funding. That would be the ultimate triumph of the political classes, who would be able to ignore the rest of us for ever.

We need a funding method that forces parties to take heed of voters not a system that expels voters for good.